Day 2. I sat through two sessions this morning, one with Dr. Stephen Herrod on the future of Virtualization: From the Mobile Phone to the and the Cloud and the other Conquering costs and complexities in a virtualized environment: Research and case studies with to HP guys and a lady from IDC. Both were very interesting sessions.

The both sessions touched on a tectonic shift that has already started to happen within the industry as datacenters start to virtualize. This will have a couple of significant impacts. Firstly, it is predicted by 2012 the number of virtual servers will have outgrown physical servers, and secondly, the overall growth of servers will start to flatten. In 2005, 7 million servers were shipped, 1 million of them were virtual servers. By 2012 the predicted shipped amount of servers will be 9 million physical and 16 million virtual. It has been an amazing growth, but that will taper off as the volume will be so great.

One of the biggest issues that need to be address is the virtualization management gap between virtual and logical servers. Steve Herrod is quick to point out the growing number of VM tools becoming available and how easy it will be to manage all assets from servers to desktops to iPhones. But the underlining fabric of the datacenters needs to rethought to accommodate this shift. Right practice tools need to be able to manage the infrastructure and high stakes are placed around disaster recovery as datacenters consolidate. These are no longer an option.

I really enjoyed the section in the first session where Steve Herrod demonstrated access to his personal desktop via a iPhone app called PocketCloud from Wyse. This demonstrated a path to manage the data center via a handheld devise which is almost within our grasp. There was also a Visa app for the iPhone were you can track you visa expenses real time, and then when you run out of cash, Google maps is available to show you where the nearest ATM machine is. Too funny.

But all this is very dependant on the stability of the infrastructure and the ability of removing all the five “9” and replacing them with “0”, getting power and cooling costs right down and the ability of moving into the Cloud. So how long will it take s us to get fully integrated into the cloud? IDC thinks we are still 10 to 15 years away and we still have a very interesting journey to get there. I will enjoy this journey.

This is my last full day today, but I will be publishing a few more articles before I leave San Francisco tomorrow.

And if you want to keep up with up-to-date VMworld 2009 news, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @HPStorageGuy, @BladeNews @ProLiant

Chris Purcell